Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  He was sixty-four, small, muscular, and still sturdy, his brown skin shining with sun, with only a looseness of skin around the knees to hint at his age, which showed more in his face. His cheekbones jutted like shelves; that, and a paleness of forehead and his flat hair, suggested that he wore a heavy hat while at work in the sun.

  It was of his corpse duties that he was now speaking to Umar, and his speech was jovial, as though he was about to break into laughter. His duties did not abash him. He had inherited his position as koum from his father, and he had also inherited an acre of land. That explained his physique, that labour in the rice field. He had done well. He saw himself as a successful man who had lived a good and useful life.

  So he had no regrets? Things had gone well for the country?

  He seemed to explode into laughter. Gone well? Things had got better and better. Life had never been better; he lived in the good time. What was there in the past for him to regret? There had been the Dutch; and when he was twenty-six the Japanese had occupied Java.

  What was that time like? How had he got on with the Japanese?

  Again his speech was like an explosion of laughter. It was a dreadful time, he said. Everything was short. They had no cloth. They had had to wear pants of sacking. And after that there was the revolution, the war against the Dutch. The village was one of those the Dutch regularly searched after they had invaded Yogyakarta; he had often had to run away and hide. No, this was the good time.

  What of Sukarno, the leader against the Dutch?

  And the reply of the old man, the peasant standing beside his hovel, was astonishing. His face softened; his voice softened. He said, “Ah. He was a handsome man. He spoke well.”

  Umar said after he translated, “Beauty is important here. A leader has to be good-looking. But I suppose that is true in most countries.”

  Yet it was strange, even in Java, with its ritual and courtesies: beauty and a gift for oratory leading a colonized people through cruel wars. Wouldn’t there have been more to Sukarno in the early days, in the 1930s?

  “Ask him when he first heard of Sukarno.”

  The reply came, and Umar laughed. “He says 1945. I must say that’s news to me.”

  I said, “I was expecting to hear about the young Sukarno in the 1930s.”

  “I wasn’t expecting that. Sukarno was exiled for much of that time. There wasn’t that amount of media coverage in those days. And what there was the Dutch controlled. I was expecting him to say that he first heard of Sukarno during the Japanese occupation, when the Japanese brought him back from exile.”

  So the old man had heard of Sukarno only after independence had been proclaimed in August 1945. Sukarno had appeared suddenly, the leader, not only a man with an army, but also a man to follow because of his looks and because he spoke well.

  Two white cows at the other end of the yard were eating cut grass. The tinkling of the bells around their necks accompanied the old man’s bubbling talk. Life had turned out well for him, after all, better than he might have expected during the Japanese occupation, when times were hard and he had no knowledge of the existence of a leader.

  But why, though being so well-to-do, with his acre of land, which was a lot, and his duties as koum, why did he live in such a poor hut?

  Umar and Linus talked, and Umar said afterwards, “It’s a matter of a particular life style.” Then Umar put the question to the old man, and the old man said, “It’s the way of Islam.”

  It was a way that was no longer being followed, he said. Only a third of the Muslims lived as Muslims; only a third went to the mosque. There was a change among the young, though. Why? Perhaps, he said, it was because in the government schools religion was being taught as a subject, and the young people had to study it if they wanted to get good grades.

  He and Umar talked some more. The slender, long-legged cocks of Java walked about the damp yard; the cows’ bells tinkled; the old man’s wife watched us from the dark, junk-filled verandah and smiled.

  Umar said, “I’ve been asking him about the wayang.” The puppet theatre. “Whether as a Muslim he objected to the Hindu stories. He said no; they were just stories.”

  We made our way back to Linus’s house—more tea, more steaming corn, a plate of hot chips made from some kind of dried fruit. Linus’s mother walked out with us when we left. Shelled corncobs were drying on a mat in the front yard. The cobs were to be sold, to be crushed for oil; everything had a use here. And this time I took in the little roadside shack which was the family shop: Linus’s family were also traders.

  Umar wanted to show me the traditional Javanese house. Linus knew where one was. The house was not prepared for a visit, was cluttered; but the woman of the house smiled while we looked around, and showed us where the shrine to the rice goddess would have been. And it seemed to me that after this intrusion, Umar, as we left, made an especially low bow and did an especially long sideways shuffle. Such archaic elegance; and the ordinary main road, with its scooters, was only a few minutes away.

  Here we had created a disturbance, though. The children had come out to watch. Every little girl had a doll, but it was a living doll: a little brother or sister held on the hip.

  It was only half an hour to Yogya. But not all could make the journey from village to town as Linus had done. Linus was privileged. He was a poet; he had a sense of who he was; he could be a man apart. Not many villagers were like that. They had been made by the villages. They needed the security of the extended family, the security of the village commune, however feudally run, however heavy the obligations of the night watch or the communal labour in the rice fields. For such men the villages were indeed enchanted places, hard to break out of. And if a man was forced to leave—because there simply wasn’t the land now to support him—it was for the extended family—and something like the village again—that he looked, in the factory or the office, even in Jakarta.

  ISLAM, like Christianity, complemented the older religions. The religion of the village was a composite religion; the idea of the good life was a composite idea. People lived with everything at once: the mosque, the church, Krishna, the rice goddess, a remnant of Hindu caste, the Buddhist idea of nirvana, the Muslim idea of paradise. No one, Umar Kayam said, could say precisely what he was. People said, “I am a Muslim, but—” Or, “I am a Christian, but—”

  And Umar told this story about the Prambanam villagers. In 1965, after the military take-over, the government, nervous of the communism of the late Sukarno period, required everyone formally to declare his religion. The people of Prambanam were in a quandary. In one way they were Muslims, believing in the Prophet and his paradise. But they didn’t feel they could say they were Muslims: they broke too many of the rules. They knew that their ancestors had built the great ninth-century temples of Prambanam—which people from all over the world now came to visit; and though they no longer fully understood the significance of the temples, they knew they were Hindu temples. They liked watching the puppet plays based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and they knew that these were Hindu epics. So the Prambanam people felt they should declare themselves Hindus.

  The trouble then was that they didn’t know what they should do as Hindus. They had no priests and no idea of the rituals they should perform. They sent for Balinese Hindu priests, and the Balinese came over with a Balinese gamelan orchestra to instruct them. But it didn’t work. The past couldn’t be reconstructed; the old rituals and theology couldn’t take again. And so the people of Prambanam had returned to being what they had been, people of a composite religion.

  On Thursday, at that time of late afternoon which Prasojo had said was the most beautiful time of the Javanese day, a woman sat outside her little shop in one of the main streets of Yogya, making up little banana-leaf sachets of rose petals, jasmine, and the sweet-smelling lime-green flowers of the ylang-ylang. She was pregnant and she sat with her legs apart. The banana-leaf pieces were in a basket; the petals and blossoms and other things were in sep
arate dishes. She worked fast, taking two strips of banana leaf, pinning them together at the bottom in a pocket with a piece of coconut-leaf rib, throwing red and white petals into this pocket, adding jasmine, sometimes perfume from a bottle, and then pinning the pocket at the top. Sometimes she added a yellow paste or a piece of a brown stick—it depended on what the customer wanted. The waiting customers were girls and women. The sachets cost fifteen rupiah, under three cents. They were flower offerings to be made to the spirits of the dead; they were to be used in houses or placed in graveyards; and Thursday evening was the time to buy, because Friday, the Muslim sabbath, had become the holy day.

  Umar Kayam lived opposite a Chinese cemetery. It made for openness and quiet, but some of his relations didn’t want to visit him. He told them that the Chinese were industrious and successful and Chinese graveyard spirits were likely to be good spirits. But some people didn’t want to hear.

  The religion which at one end was the religion of unfettered awe was at the other end a religion of extraordinary refinement. The people who lived close to the spirits of the dead also possessed living epics that had become moral texts. The rituals and difficult theology of Hinduism couldn’t be re-established. But Hinduism had left Java its most human and literary side, its epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; and the epics lived in the puppet plays, the wayang.

  The Mahabharata was longer. It took nine hours and was “heavy” for a puppet-master, who had to do all the characters, all the different voices. The Ramayana was done more often; and everywhere in Central Java the word Ramayana appeared—on the backs of buses, on shop signs. The stories, reworked and added to over the centuries, had become part of the common imagination. The characters were at once divine and human. Even in the programme notes for the abbreviated tourist wayang across the road from the Sheraton Hotel, the characters were referred to as R. Rama, R. Lesmana, R. Hanoman—R. for raden, a noble, as some people still liked to label themselves—so that the archaic, stylized puppet shadows on the white screen, while connecting people to a heroic past, remained related to the present.

  The stories were more than stories. They were not flat. They offered ambiguities. Here, from Human Character in the Wayang, a book of reprinted newspaper articles by Sri Mulyono, a puppet-master, is one little part of the Ramayana story. King Rahwana of Alengka has abducted Sinta, the beautiful wife of King Rama of Mangliawan. King Rama invades Alengka to rescue his wife. Wibisana, the younger brother of King Rahwana, rebukes Rahwana for abducting the beautiful Sinta and pleads with him to return Sinta to her husband. Rahwana pays no attention, and Wibisana joins the invading army. Was Wibisana right to serve what he saw as the good cause? Or was Wibisana’s act an act of betrayal? Need he have acted at all?

  The invading army begins to win. King Rahwana in despair turns to his other brother, Kumbakarna. He tells Kumbakarna, “You are my last resource. My generals are dead. Our country is being destroyed. Help me.” Kumbakarna says, “Return Sinta to her husband. You still have time.” Rahwana refuses. He tells Kumbakarna, “Your sons have been killed by the invaders.” Kumbakarna, in a frenzy then, goes out to fight the invaders and dies horribly. What cause has he served?

  The good puppet-master, whatever his interpretation of the story, political, mystical, leaves the issues open. Everyone watching responds according to his character and circumstances. And the story is denser than appears in this account. Because every character trails his own ancestry and dilemmas, even the wicked Rahwana, even the beautiful Sinta. Everyone is engaged in his own search, and at his appearance in the story is in a crisis; so that, as in the profoundest drama or fiction, every encounter is charged with meaning. The epics are endless. The puppet plays bear any number of repetitions, because the more the audience knows the more it understands; and interpretations of motive, of what is right and wrong or expedient, will constantly change.

  Salvation is the ultimate good, nirvana; it is to be achieved by the conquest of the senses—a way that is full of self-deceptions. And the Islamic idea of paradise fits easily into the Buddhist-Hindu dream of the life without worldly entanglement and stress. The Islamic idea of the omnipotent God merges into the more mystical Hindu concept of Wisnu, Vishnu, who, as Sri Mulyono says, is “Truth … Reality, the source of all things and all life.”

  The open-and-shut morality of Islam, always with its answers in the book or in the doings of the Prophet, gives way in the puppet theatre to something else. Hinduism and Buddhism shed their complexity. It is as if, at this far end of the world, the people of Java had taken what was most human and liberating from the religions that had come their way, to make their own. Umar Kayam saw the wayang and the epics as the core of Javanese religion and civilization. They explained the ritual, the courtesies, the constant preoccupation with human behaviour.

  There was another side to this concern with beauty and correct behaviour. In 1965, when Sukarno and his communistic government had been deposed, between half a million to a million people were slaughtered in Indonesia. All the frustrations of overrefinement came out then; every kind of private feud was settled. In Hindu Bali, which the tourists now visit, the killing was as fierce as anywhere else. But there, to give a touch of ritual to the butchery, the village gangs took out the gamelan orchestras when they went killing.

  ISLAM was part of the composite religion. And the questions raised by the Australian academic in his letter to Taufiq remained. What did the new missionary Islam, the Islam of the pesantren, have to offer these villages? What new ideas of land tenure, what kind of debate did it offer to these villages which were not as enchanted as they looked, where the balance was broken?

  There were too many people. But the government family-planning programme was threatening the extended-family system, the protection that system gave. More food was needed. But the new rice that gave two crops a year destroyed the old rhythm of village life, interfered with the festivals, didn’t give people the time for the puppet plays, and in this way was undermining the old civilization, breaking up the bonds between men. The farmers were in debt. The two crops a year made them borrow from the bank for fertilizer and seed. The extension of rural banking was meant to help, but borrowing from the bank was not like borrowing from the village moneylender, whom everyone in the village knew. To borrow from the bank was to become the puppet or victim of an impersonal institution.

  The koum of Linus’s village said that young people were learning more about Islam at school and for that reason were becoming more interested in the faith. But the koum’s Islam was the old Islam of the village; and the koum, with his fees for his religious services, his acre of land, and his knowledge of the past, saw himself living in the good time. There were many people now who knew nothing of the Japanese or the Dutch, many people for whom there was no longer room in the village, people who were being ejected or banished from the only way of life they knew. They lived in a bad time; and the Islam that spoke to them was not the koum’s Islam, but an Islam that sanctified their sense of wrongness.

  At Pabelan I had been given a copy of an article from an unnamed magazine. It was an interview, by “a Christian lay person,” with a Muslim kiyai or pesantren leader. “You ask me the situation of the farmers today and how the kiyai can change this unjust society? The farmers today do not receive justice. Most of them are poor because they have no land. There are more farmers now who have no job. The landlords use machines, instead of the farmers, in their farms. The farmers receive very low prices for their products. Meanwhile, the rich in our society are so rich. They get their wealth from the money that is given or lent to our country by very rich nations. Now, how can a kiyai help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah?”

  But who were the creatures of Allah and who were not? What land was there to give back in overpeopled Java? Java was not Malaysia. Most of the people
in Linus’s village farmed half an acre. Were these people rich? The koum, with his acre, considered himself well off. What land did he have to give back?

  The Islam that was coming to the villages—brushed with new and borrowed ideas about the wickedness of the machine, the misuse of foreign aid—was the Islam that in the late twentieth century had rediscovered its political roots. The Prophet had founded a state. He had given men the idea of equality and union. The dynastic quarrels that had come early to this state had entered the theology of the religion; so that this religion, which filled men’s days with rituals and ceremonies of worship, which preached the afterlife, at the same time gave men the sharpest sense of worldly injustice and made that part of religion.

  This late-twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins—the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything—but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.

  SUDDENLY in Yogyakarta there were tourists, tours from Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia; and the Sheraton began to fill up. What was there for them in Yogya? What did the Australians do? Where did they go? The visitors I saw at the temples of Borobudur and Prambanam were Indonesians, and a few Germans. The gamelan orchestra played in the Sheraton lobby for an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon; but no one seemed to listen. In the restaurant on the seventh floor there was classical Javanese dancing of a high order for an hour in the evening; but there were always empty tables there. Yogya, in fact, was only a halt for the tours, something thrown in. The true goal was Bali, of the enchanted name: Bali for Christmas.

  I wondered about the Australians. But I knew what one of them was doing. He was preparing a scholarly paper on the charcoal-burners of Java. It had been discovered that they were a disappearing species, with the cutting down of the forests of Java; and apparently there were people in Jakarta who, though selling tomatoes or repairing shoes or pushing food carts, insisted that they were charcoal-burners. I had heard about this sad idiosyncrasy from a pretty woman sociologist who had contracted typhoid from being in the field, padding about a Javanese village. And I had thought that that was all that could be said.